For oto we sawed plywood this year again. It was maybe 4 or 5 layer of wood shavings and glue in between, thick maybe 5 to 6mm, of rather hard wood, it was quite strong. We got the blueprint, transfered it on wood, to cut and glue. The task was to make a model of a kiosk (newsstand, not what the word means in the US).
Except it was never so simple. For one, Miloš never explained to us that any carpenter would affix the thing he saws to the desktop, so we had to hold it by hand, which didn't go smoothly, and the wee saw blades (from the toolset we all had to have) would often break if we pull wrongly, or if they overheated when we did it too fast. We lubricated them with a small piece of soap, which worked until we forget how often we should do it. Years later I learned that it's just like any other hand tool, you work it until you get into a routine, and after that it works by itself. But can't acquire a routine if you do it as homework, an hour or two a week.
This was additionally complicated by involvement of pedagogic theory, so we did this in groups. Many years later I accumulated enough ammunition with which this idea (and its authors and specially the characters who'd unearth it from archives every now and then and revampire it) should be riddled whenever it raises [its] head. It mostly comes down to having, in the group, one who concluded that he needs do nothing, because there's the rest of you with better grades, so justify them. Yes, the grade is at group level, so all of its members get the same, which is exactly the worst part, and the cause of the bad dynamic in the group. The remaining members are disinterested and try to do as little as they can get away with, counting on the one excellent student in the group to not allow this to lower his grade and to do all the work, swimmingly, and then they all get a better grade without moving a finger. I've seen this happen many times, in the following years and decades.
It was a bit different this time, the groups were of two, and I got paired with Borče. We had a week or two to do this. His part was to cut the parts, and mine to put them together. He passed the cuts to me on the last day before the due date, and then I also forgot to look into it until after dinner. Eventually when dad asked whether I did the homework, I remembered to take the parts out of my bag. There, the horrors... it was not only cut imprecisely, being off by a millimeter or two, which on a 15 cm model is a lot and would never look right when put together, it's that the cuts weren't straight but at some angle close to 45°. I kind of tried to straighten it, but that would require repeating all the cuts, so it would last as long as the first cutting, all of them were wrong. Tried to file it off, but the file we had in our school toolkit was a toy, not up to the task, and this would also take hours. And it was getting late, my folks wanted to go to sleep, and I also had enough already.
So I submitted it as it was, Miloš gave us a two each, and of course, by semester's end already forgot how we earned it.
15-V-2026 - 15-V-2026